It happened so quickly that my Beneath magic had no time to answer. One minute, Mick was looking at me in sorrow, the next, I had no air. I recognized the tentacles of a quick and dirty binding spell, felt Mick’s hands on my neck and over my mouth, but too late. Spots crashed into my vision and then darkness.
Sixteen
I swam to wakefulness inside a moving vehicle. It was mercifully quiet, except for the occasional burst of static from a police radio. My head was cushioned against a strong thigh, and an equally strong hand smoothed my hair.
Opening my eyes didn’t help much. It was daylight—I thought—but I stared at the dark, bare floorboards of someone’s backseat. I groaned.
“Can you knock her out again?” Nash asked from the front.
Mick leaned over me, his touch gentle. “You okay, sweetheart?”
“No.”
The word dragged out from my tight mouth. I could barely move my lips, or anything else for that matter. I lay on Mick’s comfortable lap for a long time, getting my bearings and feeling absolutely shitty. The Beneath magic was gone—where, I didn’t know—and it had left me with a hell of a hangover. Or maybe that was the martinis.
“I told you ten times already,” Maya said from somewhere in front of me. “I don’t know anything about a dead guy in the hotel room. I booked the room, but we decided not to go in. We went to a strip club instead. With male strippers. I paid a hundred bucks for a lap dance.” Maya was lying—she’d never gotten near the strippers.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Nash said in a tight voice.
“His ass was way better than yours.”
I laughed, which quickly turned into a cough. “Can I have some water?”
Mick helped me sit up against him and fed me water from a sports bottle. I almost choked on it.
He patiently wiped my mouth with a tissue, and I looked up into his worried eyes. “It’s gone,” I said. “The Beneath magic. I don’t have a drop left.”
I didn’t. Outside the windows, deep banks of clouds hugged the approaching mountains, a good old-fashioned storm building. The storm tingled through my blood, but the Beneath magic had fled. Not forever; I knew that.
“Janet, Nash thinks we killed someone,” Maya said. “You and me. Can you believe it?” Her voice begged me to support her in the lie.
Nash’s hands tightened on the wheel. “There was a bloody corpse on the hotel room floor. The only reason you two aren’t locked behind heavy bars is because I vouched for you. It looked like the guy had been turned inside out. Sound familiar?”
I leaned back against Mick. “I didn’t kill him, and neither did Maya. Jim did. He killed the guy in Magellan too, a hiker. I don’t know who the hiker was.”
Nash gave me a furious glance in the rearview mirror. “Who the hell is Jim?”
“Jim Mohan. He was a guest at my hotel. He’s dead too, stabbed up at Homol’ovi a couple days ago. Not by me,” I added quickly.
“If he was stabbed a couple days ago, how the hell did he kill someone in Maya’s hotel room tonight?”
“He got resurrected. I don’t know who by. Now he’s undead and out of control.”
“Undead,” Nash repeated. “Right.”
“Where is he?” I asked. “Jim, I mean. He was in the club when it came down.”
“They didn’t pull anyone out,” Mick said.
I pushed myself up into a sitting position. Outside, desert mountains rushed by, rolling Arizona mountains, not stark Nevada peaks. The motion of the SUV made my stomach unhappy, and my neck hurt too. I rubbed it, and I suddenly remembered Mick’s fiercely strong hand twisting it; that plus his binding spell and his palm over my face rendering me unconscious. He could have snapped my neck right there, end of Janet problem.
I scooted away from him. “Don’t touch me.”
Mick didn’t look contrite. I knew he wouldn’t bother explaining or apologizing, and I knew he’d decided that it was the only way to stop me. I folded my arms and stared out the window. I was getting tired of being grateful to Mick for
not
killing me.
I’d grown up being distrusted by my own family, by my own people, and I’d left home as soon as I could. When I’d met Mick on the road, I’d thought I’d finally found someone for me. He’d protected me and treasured me, and I’d basked in his attention. But he’d kept so much from me, and when I’d found out why he’d really picked me up, the hurt of that had stung for a long time. I’d talked myself into putting it behind us, starting our relationship afresh.
And here was Mick, still watching me, still waiting for me to go wrong. He was my guardian and my lover but also my parole officer. When he thought I was getting dangerous, he’d step in and render me harmless. Then say, “I’m sorry, baby,” kiss me, and make love to me until I forgot about it.
What the hell kind of relationship was that?
“Nash, stop,” I said.
Nash continued driving at a precise seventy-five miles per hour. “Why?”
“Just stop. I want to get out.”
“What for? I have airsick bags back there if you need to throw up.”
“You’re all heart. No, I want to get out because I don’t want to be around you people. If I’m so fucking dangerous, I’ll leave. I’ll go to Greenland or something, and you’ll never have to worry about me again.”
“I’ll go with you,” Maya said.
“No one is going anywhere,” Nash said firmly. “You, Maya, are going home to sleep it off, and you, Janet, are staying put in your hotel while you tell me everything that’s really going on.”
“You’re a bastard,” Maya said. “We went dancing. We didn’t ask for some guy to pull a gun on us, or for someone to attack us in the club.”
“A gun?” Nash roared. “What the hell?”
“Stop the truck,” Mick said. “I’ll get out.”
My arms were jammed over my chest, fists buried in my sides. My throat was so tight I couldn’t speak.
“We’re miles from anywhere,” Nash said.
“Doesn’t matter. Pull off.”
Nash went silent, which meant he didn’t have a legitimate argument for dragging Mick back to Magellan with us. Even Maya stopped berating Nash and sat silently. At the Ash Fork exit, Nash left the freeway, pulling over at the bottom of the ramp.
Mick opened the door before the SUV stopped. I wanted to be sick. I thought of the dragons waiting to make him go through gods-knew-what ordeal. I thought of other dangers lurking, like an undead man who couldn’t control his homicidal tendencies. I was scared for Mick and furious at him, and mad at myself for caring so much.
Mick hopped from the SUV. He held the door, his body silhouetted against the morning sky. “Janet, tell Colby that if he brings you to the trial, I will kill him.”
“Mick,” I said. “It’s dangerous out there.”
“So am I.” He slammed the door. Nash gave him an inquiring look out his open window, but Mick shook his head and walked away.
Nash pulled off, and Mick started down the highway that snaked southward to Chino Valley. I watched his lone, upright figure as long as I could, until Nash rounded a curve, and Mick was lost to sight.
I had to explain to Naomi why I’d left her shoe behind in Las Vegas. Nash had sent a deputy to retrieve Maya’s truck, but of course Naomi’s sandal was buried under rubble. Naomi didn’t care about the shoes, but she was not happy with me for running off as we had, after I’d admonished
her
to be careful. I meekly offered to buy her another pair, but I could see that she was mad as hell at me.
If Naomi was angry, Jamison was furious. At me, not Maya. Jamison came to the hotel the evening we got home, while I was in my office still nursing one hell of a hangover. I’d already related the entire tale to Nash, including everything I knew about the undead Jim Mohan. When Jamison started demanding explanations, I lost it.
“Mick is the gods know where,” I shouted. “With dragons breathing down his neck, and a lunatic out there turning people inside out. Mick looks at me like he’s scared to death of what’s inside me, and unless you’ve had someone do that to you, you can’t understand it. I’m sorry some idiot tried to rape us in Las Vegas and that Undead Jim tried to kill us. It happens to me, all right? I’m doing the best I can.”
Jamison listened to me with his usual stoicism. He’d known me since high school, when he, a handsome Navajo a couple of years older than me, had helped me come to terms with my storm powers. Then, he’d been a minor shaman; now he was a Changer. It was because of Jamison that I’d moved to Magellan in the first place, and he felt responsible for me.
“None of that is why I’m angry at you,” Jamison said.
“Just tell me, then. I’m not in the mood for cryptic.”
Jamison folded his strong hands, the same hands that could sculpt like a god and touch Naomi with tenderness. “You’re battling something, and you’re doing it alone. I thought we were friends.”
“If you mean the Beneath magic, it’s powerful shit, Jamison. I don’t want you anywhere near it. Besides, I think I can control it now.”
“I’m remembering a fifteen-year-old girl, one eaten up with storm magic. So scared she was afraid to go to school, and she’d run away from home so her grandmother wouldn’t make her go. She was sitting on a ledge overlooking Spider Rock and crying because she couldn’t make the lightning stop.”
I remembered. The storm had been a major one. Electricity had crawled all over my body, and it was coming out of me in bursts. Terrified that I’d burn down my house, the school, and everyone within reach, I’d stolen my dad’s pickup and driven down to Canyon de Chelly, figuring I could direct the lightning into the chasm. The storm would keep people away, and I wouldn’t hurt anyone.
Then Jamison had arrived, the young shaman out to commune with nature. The gods had been looking out for me that day. Because of Jamison, I’d finally believed I could live a somewhat normal life.
“I helped you then,” Jamison said. “I can help you now.”
“This is different. Storm magic is earth magic, wholesome even if it’s deadly. Beneath magic isn’t like that at all. It’s like a living entity. It wants to destroy, and it wants to use me to do it. I hear words in my head.”
“Your mother’s words?”
“No. It’s not her. It’s me. Or some part of me I never knew existed.”
“So we explore what it is. You have to look at it, Janet. You can’t run away from it.”
My headache gave a sharp jab, or it might have been my fear. “It’s nothing you want to have anything to do with. You can’t understand what this is like.”
Jamison gave a short laugh. “I found out I was a Changer when my body morphed into a mountain lion’s, just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “I spent two years locked in a cage in Mexico while crazy people taught me how to control the change and the power. That ordeal knocked the arrogance out of me. I do think your power’s dangerous, which is exactly why you need to find out what it is and how to deal with it.”
I clenched my hands on my desk. My father gazed out of his picture at me, seeming to agree with Jamison.
“I hate it when you’re logical,” I said.
He grinned. “Get some sage. Let’s do this.”
We went upstairs to the roof, under the twilit sky. East of Magellan, the railroad bed made a straight border between town and desert. Beyond that, the world rolled away to the horizon. The ground looked flat, but scores of washes and arroyos cut through it, along with the wide crevice that housed Chevelon Creek. Chevelon was a place of mysteries, where ancient peoples had left petroglyphs along the walls, depicting strange-looking beings. I liked to walk there in dry weather, looking at the pictograms and trying to figure out what they meant. I was pretty sure that many of them depicted the goddesses and demons from Beneath, though some New Agers liked to believe they were aliens. But then, Beneath was another world, so maybe the New Agers aren’t too far off.
Jamison and I faced each other, cross-legged, and he lit a sage stick and dropped it into a stone bowl. I’d brought a shard of the magic mirror in case it could help, though I warned it sternly to stay quiet.
Jamison took my hands and held them in the smoke. The pungent sage wafted into the cooling air, and I inhaled deeply.
Jamison spoke in the Diné language, whispering words of magic. I loved Jamison’s voice, velvet and lilting. He was one hell of a good storyteller. Naomi had fallen in love with him the night he’d come to tell stories in Magellan, and I understood why.
“Let your thoughts go,” he murmured to me. “Let them drift wherever they will.” His hands tightened. “And stop concentrating on sex.”
How did he always know? “I was thinking about you and Naomi.”
Jamison flushed but didn’t look all that embarrassed. “I never thought of you as a voyeur.”
“I meant that what you two have is great.”
“Mmm,” the shard of magic mirror said at my feet. “Please tell me
everything
you’re thinking, so I can imagine it too. Don’t hold back.”
Jamison squeezed my hands again. “You’re avoiding what we’re supposed to do. Let your thoughts go. Concentrate on the smell of smoke and the sounds of the night.”